AristaCare Health will acquire Philadelphia nursing home Tulip Special Care

Mar. 21—AristaCare Health Services, a New Jersey nursing home operator, will acquire Tulip Special Care, a 66-bed nursing home in the East Falls section of Philadelphia that specializes in care for people who need ventilators or have tracheostomies, according to a notice provided to city officials.

Tulip will be AristaCare's second nursing home in the region specialized in ventilator care, if the deal is completed as expected by May 1. The price for Tulip Special Care was not disclosed. Tulip employs 85 people.

"I want the staff. Staff is so hard to come by, and if there's good staff there, we definitely want them," said AristaCare CEO Sidney Greenberger, who hadn't yet seen an employee list.

AristaCare, a for-profit firm based in Cranford, N.J., operates six facilities in its home state, as well as AristaCare at Meadow Springs in Plymouth Meeting since 2006. That Montgomery County facility uses 90 of its 153 beds for ventilator patients, who have such severe respiratory problems that they need mechanical help breathing.

Tulip opened in 2018 on the seventh floor of the former Medical College of Pennsylvania Hospital on Henry Avenue near Route 1. Two of the original investors, Brian G. McElwee and Michael F. Young, will remain part of the new ownership group, the city filing said.

"I am confident that AristaCare's acquisition of Tulip Special Care will benefit our patients and the North Philadelphia community," Young said in an email.

Independently run, single nursing homes like Tulip face financial challenges because they can't spread regulatory, billing, purchasing, and other back-office overhead across a network of facilities. When it opened, Tulip also struggled with what officials there and at other similar operators said were inadequate rates from Medicaid.

That changed in 2021 when the state legislature passed a law that provided a $130 daily supplemental payment for nursing homes that served a significant number of Medicaid patients who needed ventilators.

"The rates are relatively workable if you have the economies of scale and a high occupancy level," Greenberger said.

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